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What does love mean?

Everyone talks about love. “I love my girlfriend”… or “I love my house”, but everyone just assumes that they know what love is. Do they really?

What’s the difference between loving your girlfriend and loving your house? Is there one? Do you get jealous if your house spends time with other people, for instance? … Didn’t think so.

Maybe it’ll be easier to work backwards. What ISN’T love?

Is love possessiveness? Can you love someone while forcing them to be with you alone and not even look at other people? I think not.

Is love lust? If you’re perving on someone, does that mean you love them? On its own, no, but it doesn’t mean you DON’T also love them…

Going back to the house jealousy example above… is jealousy love? If you feel neglected or left out if someone you love spends time with other people, what does that say about your self-esteem and trust for that person? You either don’t trust the person, or you have some insecurity issues you should probably work on. It doesn’t mean you don’t love the person, at least not in theory… but I’d be willing to bet the majority of people who claim to love someone, but get jealous when that person spends time with someone else… I’d bet most of those people don’t really love that person. Why? Because if you truly genuinely love someone unconditionally, you want that person to be happy and free, and you would never want to hold him/her back by limiting what he/she can do. If spending time with other people makes him/her happy, then that’s precisely what you want him/her to do.

Say you love someone, and that person changes, do you still love them? “It depends on what changed!” I hear you say… but doesn’t that mean that you never really loved the PERSON, you only loved certain aspects of them? People change all the time, if you are to say that you love a person, you need to be able to truthfully say that you love all their changes as well. How many parents can honestly say that about their kids? I see a lot of parents wanting their kids to be a certain way, and getting upset when their kids don’t turn out that way. That isn’t love.

Real love is unconditional. I know many people say there are different kinds of love, but I’m here to say that’s all nonsense. Romantic love? Brotherly love? What’s the difference? They’re both love, but romantic love for example has romance added on as well. It’s not a different kind of love, it’s just love + romance. Simple enough. What about brotherly love? That’s plain old simple unconditional love with no added features. Think about all the different “types of love” people talk about, and try to seperate them into their individual parts. Love will always be one part, and there may or may not be other parts to go along with it. And maybe some of these “types” aren’t even love at all… okay, let’s have a look at “erotic love”. What’s that? I’d say that’s just love+lust… HOWEVER, a lot of people think that lust=love… they think that if they feel attracted to someone, then that means they love that person. That is not true at all. You can be attracted to people without loving them whatsoever, and you can love people without being attracted to them at all. So “erotic love” is if you manage to do both: love someone and also be attracted to them as well. It’s actually all very simple, but all the nonsense you see on TV is bound to confuse the hell out of everyone.

So, back to the original question… “What does love mean?“…
I don’t know. I actually seriously don’t know how to tell you what it means. We’ve clarified what it ISN’T, but how do I explain what it actually means? It’s more than just an emotional feeling, real true unconditional love is actually more of a spiritual thing, it’s something that changes everything about you, your entire outlook on life… not just some simple emotional chemicals in your brain like the scientist people like to talk about.

So I guess the simplest way to answer the question would be to say: “Love means everything”.

About The Meaning Of Love

I write about love because I have always been deeply bothered by society’s definitions of love and how most people talk about love, and everything they associate with it. I have given this topic years of thought, and always found it extremely hard to explain my thoughts in actual words. How do you explain something as abstract and unexplainable as love? Sometimes the topic comes up on forums and I always respond to people as best I can. At first I was terrible at getting my point across, but after enough attempts I actually started to make some sense to myself. Then one day I realized I had typed quite a lot, and I never seem to run out of steam on this topic, so why not write some full articles about it?
Click my little picture on the left to see all my articles.

i sincerely agree with you. i believe true love is unconditional and spiritual and cannot be explained. its spiritual when u cant even give a solid reason out of the ordinary why u feel this way for that person that’s when it is said that love is blind. i believe love is giving, giving, giving and more giving. love is sharing it cant fully be explained its a mystery as God is to us. simply put, God is Love. If u know God u would know what it can feel like or would actually feel like to love someone.

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